


Leveraging Long-term Strategic Lessons

by alliedwolves



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Blood Drinking, Don't Write Again era fic, M/M, Mind Manipulation, Poor Barnabas has no idea what he's playing with even more than canon, Power Imbalance, takes place roughly the 1820s, turning
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:01:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24471724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alliedwolves/pseuds/alliedwolves
Summary: A statement from a letter from Barnabas Bennett, enthralled and indebted to the Lukases.Elias can see all kinds of lessons to impart from his example, to Jon, and to Martin.
Relationships: Barnabas Bennett & Mordechai Lukas, Barnabas Bennett/Jonah Magnus, Jonah Magnus & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Jonah Magnus/Robert Smirke
Comments: 5
Kudos: 45
Collections: The_Magnusquerade





	Leveraging Long-term Strategic Lessons

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Nevanna: They read over this work, and inspired it throughout. 
> 
> Sometimes you just have to use your history and literature degrees for evil

_ My dearest Jonah,  _

_ I am writing in hopes that you can free me from a most chilly and gilded prison. It is one of which you warned me and into which I have nevertheless fallen most utterly. Please, Jonah. If you have any feeling for me remaining, or indeed any more vague compassion or feeling for your fellow man within you, I beg you to come to my aid.  _

_ You will no doubt be aware that I no longer reside in the townhouse at which we made such fond memories, but I cannot tell you my current address as I am not permitted to know it. Nor have I, on the rare occasion I have seen you at the salons the Lukas family have had me serve, been able to speak to you. To remain unSeen by  _ **_you_ ** _ even while so physically close speaks of a power I both fear, and now serve.  _

_ But I digress.  _

_ It was over a debt, a trifle of a thing. I do not discard your advice lightly, Jonah, and you had said that to become indebted to one of your kind, especially Mordechai Lukas, is the surest path to a kind of slow unmaking. I had come into possession of a copy of Robert Smirke’s  _ Specimens of Continental Architecture  _ and I had, foolishly, offered to exchange it with another work in Lukas’s possession. I had fully intended to make the trade, but he kept happening upon me when I had either not been able to head to my family’s estate where it languished, or had completely forgotten to acquire it due to the urgency of my errand home. My nephew’s funeral, for instance, left me with little care for other matters, and my mother’s grieving and lonely insistence that I come at the hunting season, and pack light, quite drove the book from my mind.  _

_ To put it bluntly, I’d had means and opportunity, but thought it unimportant, and on this matter Lukas and I were quite out of sorts. He pushed upon my demurral rudely. Mordechai Lukas, it would seem, would not be denied this book, and if I had it not on my person, nor would take him to my family home to claim it in the next fortnight, it would go badly for me, if not for mine.  _

_ I confess, I was not enamoured of his tone, and responded glibly that he might take the matter before the magistrate, if it vexed him so. The loan or not of a book, regardless of its providence or interest, is no reason two worldly gentlemen ought to come to such threats as “you and yours”. Indeed, I may have suggested that I now had better cause than he to seek the magistrate’s opinion on his threats. My nephew’s death had brought a keenly felt sorrow to my family, and I had no desire to worsen matters with his insistence, or to inflict his presence on my mother's household.  _

_ Needless to say, my anxious and incensed mutterings did not impress Mordechai Lukas. To the contrary, in fact. He regarded me silently for many minutes, staring with such a cast to his face that I could feel my resolution beginning to falter. “You shall pay me,” he said at last, “in kind.” _

_ Fool that I am, Jonah, I believed myself fortunate at those words. I do not believe myself anything but the most wretched of creatures now.  _

_ He offered his hand, gloved despite the warmth of the July day, and I took it, thinking he meant to shake it and consider the matter settled. I confess, Jonah, I wished it settled, certain as he was (and I was not) that I bore him a debt. I have never felt a hand so cold, despite the warmth of the day and the good thick steel grey cotton of his gloves. He bade me meet his eyes, and again, it was a haughty formality I thought nothing of from Mordechai Lukas. His eyes, a harsh, steel blue, would not let me free as he raised my hand to his lips, kissed it once, and I found I could not stop him from unbuttoning my cuff, efficiently laying bare my wrist, and biting in.  _

_ I am no stranger, Jonah, to your kind, or to the intimate act of feeding you. I am not even a stranger to coming to,  _

_ surprised that I am doing so. I remember with aching fondness your mind in mine, and being pulled close after you had supped. Jonah, I will confess, I stifled more than once the moans and entreaties of need until you saw fit to pull me into your embrace. But while our intimacies have brought me, and I hope, you, much joy over the last year or so, there is nothing that cooled my very heart as much as watching, detached, as Mordechai Lukas drank his fill. Though my stomach ached with cold, and my heart felt as though it were pounding inside an icebox, I could do nothing, not even shiver, that might disturb him. And to ask him to hold me? I might as well have asked him to fly us to the moon, for the likely efficacy of the action. So I waited it through: I sat back, and thought not of England, but of nothing at all.  _

_ I thought then that this was the repayment he’d sought, that this would make us even in his eyes. It was no such thing. I do not believe I will ever be the equal of a chair in Mordechai Lukas’s regard. Or perhaps I am exactly that. Necessary, tasteful, occasionally misused, provided with what is needed to keep me presentable, and nothing else.  _

_ His eyes were red, now, glamour dropped while drinking from my wrist. They were as cold and empty as red glass. He once more kissed my wrist, and that was not enough to stem the bleeding. I thought it was solely for that purpose that he fastidiously removed his glove, placing his cane across my left shoulder, and I took it in hand to prevent it falling. He licked the fleshy pad of his thumb and swiped it across the bite, sure enough, but when I went to release his cane, he pinned me with such a powerful glare I found I could not move.  _

_ “No. More firmly, wretch.”  _

_ I did as he bade, holding the deceptive weight of the wood tightly as he decisively clicked a mechanism beneath its handle, and the sword inside came free. The spring was strong enough to jostle me, but Lukas stood firm, slowly unsheathing the swordstick just enough to bring his thumb down on the silvery blade. He pulled the stick’s sheathe forward, and me with it, catching me by the chin in his ungloved and bleeding hand, the contact like a brand placed in ice, not fire. He tilted my head back, and I started to say– something, whether to exclaim in surprise, or plead in terror, or simply to scream, I don’t know. But he implacably held his bleeding thumb in my mouth, and I found, again, that I could do nothing as my mouth filled with his blood but stare, and struggle not to swallow.  _

_ I remembered your warnings, Jonah, but the tableau we made gave mute statement of my inability now to heed them. I still held firm to his cane, his hand was curled beneath my chin. His thumb and forefinger, and the intensity of his gaze were all it took to hold me pinned where he wanted, and slowly my mouth was filling with blood that would make me even more his drudge, should I take it in. He smiled then, an efficient and cold quirk of the lips, and I knew nothing about what was in his thoughts. It was your antithesis, Jonah.  _

_ Eventually, he simply ordered me to drink, with a furrow of irritation on his brow, and I did. The more of his blood I ingested the more desperately I consumed it, and it, me. Mordechai did not once touch my mind, nor anywhere more intimate than my chin, or wrist. My attempts to draw closer, despite his having me pinned like a specimen at the Royal Society, drew only a chuckle, and his pulling his hand from my face, to repair his cut and return his gloves to rights.  _

_ “You will be ready for a coach ride to your family estate by sundown tomorrow. Write to them ahead of our travelling, if you like, though it is immaterial to your master if you should do so. I will need both the book, and some information about your townhouse, its ownership, and your finances more broadly. You will be moving closer to the family.”  _

_ Each word was as indelible as india ink on my mind, and as coolly and deftly applied.  _

_ My hand loosened, and he knocked it aside with the cane, pushing the silvered blade back into its sheath with a hard shove into the ground, and then turned on his heel without a word, leaving me quite alone.  _

_ I remember little enough of the next few days. Nothing seemed important but the establishment of some bond that Mordechai took pleasure in withholding; at times he would drink and at others he would not, and he forced me to invite him into my mother’s home. I can only be grateful I call no woman partner, nor any child my own: my mother was not of any interest to Mordechai save as host to the book he sought. I am alone in my suffering.  _

_ Smirke’s book, the trifle for which all of this was inflicted on me, turned out to be trifling to him, too, a treatise less on those magical affairs your friend is inclined to these days, and more on the architectural power commanded by the ancients. Mordechai seemed to find this hilarious if regrettable, considering me some misstep between the two of you in a dance I cannot see the whole of, much less understand. Were I able to begrudge my master anything, I might resent his having kept Smirke’s book and never lent me Smith’s  _ Six Sermons, Preached in Charlotte Street Chapel, Edinburgh,  _ but given my emotional doldrums over these last months, and my inability to hold onto much at all against him, I will instead let it go.  _

_ My enthrallment took place almost a year ago, Jonah. Since then I have been given over to both the Lukas family and their isolation entirely. My townhouse, and its little garden that Fanshawe so often admired both medically and aesthetically, belongs to them in escrow, and I do not know where I now live save it is both further north, and more prone to fog, than the homey little place I shall never see again. I suppose I am lucky that other than my brother, my mother, and yourself, I have no close kith nor kin to miss me, or to come and try to deliver me without the means or prudence to do so.  _

_ I did indeed see that happen, once, and I watched as the poor wretch in question ignored their family, unable to see them, despite their pleas. It was the closest I have seen any Lukas come to a thrall’s mind, and to see that closeness used to turn aside one’s loved ones… well.  _

_ There are many things I have suffered, or witnessed here, that do not bear written description. The salons they hold, and the uses thralls are put to in those places, drunk on venom and intimacy of contact to be dredged up later as shame, but a much missed, much needed, shame– it stands to me as a perversion of all those gilded moments you and I had. That The Lukases call we thralls a part of their ‘family’, stabled like un-gelded horses away from any who might be a point of connection… If you ask it of me, Jonah, I will tell you, or even write it down and seal it for your eyes only, if possible, but I know my master reads our correspondence and I know he does not care, and yet, it is an intimate loneliness I would not share with him.  _

_ I apologise, Jonah, for the length and excruciating detail of this correspondence. It has been so long since I have had company besides my own thoughts, my master, or the guests at his soirees, and they are certainly not interested to hear the details of my bondage. I fancy that it might be of interest to you, who have always paid some close mind to the intricacies of thought, emotion, and logics behind word and deed. Then, too, I miss you, Jonah.  _

_ Please. Even if you cannot free me from this cold halfway between life and undeath, this interminable twilight of servitude, I. I hope you can do something. Even as trifling as writing back.  _

_ Yours,  _

_ Well. Regrettably, not yours,  _

_ Barnabas Bennett  _

* * *

Having been so close with Jonah Magnus, I doubt very much that Barnabas was as alert to the dangers of other vampires as was prudent. In this, I cannot fault him, precisely. That fault, I lay more at the feet of Jonah Magnus, Jon. Had Jonah Magnus been more prudent, and more forceful, he might have taken Barnabas Bennett as a thrall earlier, and the situation avoided. Mordechai Lukas was not a man inclined to meddle with another man’s thralls. More human dalliances, as you can no doubt extrapolate, he considered fair game to destroy, and did so without compunction when he found himself in want of something. 

No, it is this hope that an accord without thralldom might be reached, and the record we have of Jonah’s researches, that make Barnabas’s eventual death still clutched tightly in the unyielding, cold clutch of the lonely so chilling. He was not even then beyond saving, if Jonah had worked at it, Jon. He did some study into the matter, on and off, for the rest of Barnabas’s life. Thralldom to another power changes one's potential, yes, but perhaps,  _ perhaps,  _ something could be done. The trouble was, there was but one method, and that was not prudent for the long term that it would inevitably become. 

The only way that could have freed him would be for Jonah to make Barnabas his Heir, giving him enough blood to See and be Seen afresh. There was nothing else that could be done. 

It was not for lack of love between them that Jonah let him languish, nor fear of a more established coven, but simply that he had known Barnabas's mind, known it intimately, and besides the shared folly of their birth, Jonah knew that there was little enough of the Eye within Barnabas Bennett. It would have weakened them both right out of the gate, Jon, for Bennett to be shaped into a prospective heir to a power of which he had no sense.

Jonah collected Barnabas's bones, when the time came, something the Lukases permitted on the condition that there be no memorial to his memory. These terms were accepted, though some caveats, or liberties, were I must admit taken. 

The head of the institute has _always_ carried the same penknife: a silvered blade, with an ornately carved bone handle. This piece of tibia, anonymous to a fault, and a skull, one I keep in my office if you know where to look, are all that remains of the lonely, and wretched, Barnabas Bennett. A kind of connection with that eternal anonymity of both thralldom, and the knowledge that one must make one's choices about others, if they are to be thralls, tools, or mere trifles, good and quickly, and make them Last. A lesson, I hope, this little scene yourself and Detective Tonner will soon come to teach you, but I leave this tape running in the hope you hear this out, as well. 


End file.
